Regina Spektor

Wake up DJ because stepping right onto the black and white checkered floor of success comes the anti-folk, anti-alternative antidote to antipathy: Regina Spektor

Born in Russia, Spektor’s playful use of language, music and video is like Lori Anderson with occasional odd sounds and intentional grating feelings but mixed in with a sweet ranging vocal essence that is compared to Tori Amos and Fiona Apple and the lyrical work of Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco and Bjork. But comparisons are better made in one’s own head, so cruise on over to reginaspektor.com and enjoy a few minutes of respite from the crazy world – in the crazy offworld of Regina.

Right away you will become enshrined with her – “they made a statue of us, our noses have begun to rust. They’ll name a city after us, and later say it’s all our fault. Then they’ll give us a talking to!” Rummaging for answers in the pages, Spektor warns we are “living in a den of theives and it’s contageous!”

Wikipedia reports “Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika,

“Now tourists come and stare at us
Blow bubbles with their gum
Take photographs for fun, for fun”

Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole. Surely “Poor Little Rich Boy” goes along with “Better” but the latter sounds fit for a post-party dance floor and the former fitter for a rap-poetry open mike.

Her features favor the camera as well. Heavily drooping eyelushes, naked of shadow surmount full lips that shape “lovesongs just to break my fall.”